18 accepted papers
This article presents a novel vision-based artificial lateral line (ALL) sensor, FlowSight, enhancing the perception capabilities of underwater robots. Through an autonomous vision system, FlowSight allows for simultaneous sensing the speed and direction of local water flow without relying on extern…
Continuum robots, inspired by octopus arms and elephant trunks, combine dexterity with intrinsic compliance, making them well suited for unstructured and confined environments. Yet their continuously deformable morphology poses challenges for motion planning and control, calling for accurate but lig
The Cosserat rod theory has become a gold standard for modeling the statics and dynamics of serial and parallel continuum robots. Recently, a weak form of these Cosserat rod models called the geometric variable strain model has been derived where the robot deformations are projected on finite-dimens
This paper addresses durability-aware trajectory planning and tracking strategies for the motion of the platform in an extensible planar tendon-actuated continuum parallel robot (CPR). The proposed planning approach combines the A* algorithm with the Geometric Variable Strain (GVS) static Cosserat r
In this letter, the continuous Cosserat static model is re-formulated by employing the piecewise linear strain (PLS) approach, which can obtain the analytic formula of the model to facilitate the controller design. The robust closed-loop control architecture based on the PLSCosserat static model for
This letter investigates the exterior workspace boundary of a soft robot with a certain configuration controlled by equipped bounded actuators. To achieve this, we implement an optimization-based approach on the studied soft robot which has been modeled by the Finite Element Method (FEM). Finally, w
Soft robots have been attracting much research attention in the past decades owing to their unique properties that are inherently different from conventional rigid robots. The intrinsic characteristics of soft robots, such as compliance and flexibility, have made them a promising supplement for many
Improving sample efficiency has been a longstanding goal in reinforcement learning. This paper proposes VRMPO algorithm: a sample efficient policy gradient method with stochastic mirror descent. In VRMPO, a novel variance-reduced policy gradient estimator is presented to improve sample efficiency. W…
Soft robotics has recently become an emergent research area due to its unique characteristics compared to conventional rigid robots. Its inherent properties, such as compliance and flexibility, provide some promising characteristics for the current robotic applications, including safe human machine
We study the convergence of Expected Sarsa(λ) with function approximation. We show that with off-line es- timate (multi-step bootstrapping) to ExpectedSarsa(λ) is unstable for off-policy learning. Furthermore, based on convex-concave saddle-point framework, we propose a con- vergent Gradient Expecte…
Considering a soft manipulator configuration, controlled via installed bounded actuators, this paper addresses the end-effector workspace estimation problem for such a soft robot. For this, the Discrete Cosserat method is adopted to deduce the mathematical model of soft manipulators, based on which
In this letter, we address the challenge of sensor fusion in Soft Robotics for estimating forces and deformations. In the context of intrinsic sensing, we propose the use of soft capacitive sensing to find a contact's location, and the use of pneumatic sensing to estimate the force intensity and the
Soft robot is an emergent research field which has variant promising applications, and the control of such robots is still challenging. Unlike using different techniques (such as Beam theory, Cosserat theory or high dimensional finite-element method) to model the dynamics of soft robots, this letter
A novel scheme for an "upgrade" of a linear control algorithm to a non-linear one is developed based on the concepts of a generalized homogeneity and an implicit homogeneous feedback design. Some tuning rules for a guaranteed improvement of a regulation quality are proposed. Theoretical results are…
This paper presents design of a robust controller with disturbance compensation for an indoor blimp robot and its realization. The movement of blimp in horizontal plane is modeled as a slider-like nonlinear system complemented with uncertain bounded disturbances. To design the output feedback contro…
In this letter, we introduce a new pneumatic mechanosensor dedicated to Soft Robotics and propose a generic method to reconstruct the magnitude of a contact-force acting on it. Changes in cavity volumes inside a soft silicon pad are measured by air-flow sensors. The resulting mechanosensor is charac
Scene text recognition has been a hot research topic in computer vision due to its various applications. The state of the art is the attention-based encoder-decoder framework that learns the mapping between input images and output sequences in a purely data-driven way. However, we observe that exist…
Modular Robot Manipulators are user-configurable manipulators which provide rapid design and inexpensive implementation. To be easy-use, smart actuators embedded with position input and position feedback controller are adopted, these local controllers render the manipulators position controlled, but…